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[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

My boyfriend has worked for our college's residential tech support department for going on three years now. Due to our student body's near-complete failure to understand the concept of up-to-date virus software, the school has gone ahead and purchased a site license for Norton. Everyone gets a copy except Linux and Mac folk, who aren't really a problem.

If your computer gets infected, and the techs find that you don't have Norton installed or that your virus definitions are more than two weeks out of date, you will be fined $100. Yeah. One hundred dollars.

On the one hand, we're all weirded out that the administration would step into this and worried about all the shit we're going to get for it. On the other hand... well, damn, that'll learn 'em to leave their computers unprotected! It's a dilemma, to be sure.

Comments

Virus Protection

[yduras.livejournal.com]

Years ago, when I was in college, I helped run the "microcomputer processing lab". We had a little bit of a virus problem, what with folks bringing in disks from whereever and "forgetting" to have us scan them, installing software not on the approved list, etc. It didn't help that some of the lab assistants were among the worst offenders.

It wasn't too bad, because in those days, you could generally reboot with a write-protected virus-software boot disk and fix things pretty easily. Until the day I came in and someone had taken the write-protect tab off our boot disk and used it to save a document to, and, of course, infected it. (Several of the students were too cheap/lazy to pay the $1 and actually own a diskette of their own.) I should mention that said disk was international orange and had written on it in black magic marker in huge letters "VIRUS BOOT DISK - DO NOT USE".

I was going to have to get a clean disk from home, overnight. Sadly, ever computer hooked up to a laser printer was infected at that point. So I put Out of Order signs on all of them, put my feet up on the desk, and spent mt shift explaining to every student who came up to print exactly why their papers were going to be late.

I never had to police the lab for unscanned diskettes, unapproved software, or stolen boot disks again, for after that time, those students who wanted to be able to print watched the machines like hawks.

I say, hit 'em where it hurts.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

I think that's pretty awesome. Might be able to update some more computers that way....

When I was in college, we were mac-based so we didn't have much of a problem.

Of course, when I was in graduate school, I was a TA in the data lab, which was all windows-based machines. We had virus-scanners on them -- it was always embarrassing when you'd stick a disk in the computer and it would shriek at you. Literally shriek -- everyone would look. And yes, I had it happen once -- stupid Word macro viruses. The majority of the school was on macs, but the graduate students were expected to have enough sense to use PCs, I guess. Well, and we were a broke political science department and I'm not sure our stat package came mac formatted.

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

damn, i wish we could do that NATIONALLY

[achernow.livejournal.com]

While I was in school, we had a site-liencse for VirusScan. I used it until I found AVG, which IMHO is a much better scanner than Norton or VS.

-A

[thebutler.livejournal.com]

*DAMNED* good idea, methinks.

Personally, I'd permamently disconnect the switch port on a first offense, but a $100 fine (preferably straight to the drinks fund) would certainly do.

[jordy.livejournal.com]

Wow. Now *that* is a good idea.

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

Mercer University started giving out site-licensed copies of Norton last year, during the Blaster insanity; this year, they finally started doing what was long overdue, disconnecting users whose computers are infected.

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

See, we've been doing disconnections for at least as long as I've been there. It just didn't keep the infection rate down far enough.